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New Stock Trading App in the Making

I’m new to web app development and Ruby on Rails, so I have been building a simple web-app as a means of learning and getting my skills up to scratch in a range of areas.

The application is basic, it provides some stock data on 10 different NYSE listed companies. Each company’s name and ticker symbol is stored in a database table. Every day, a background worker (using the Resque gem ( https://github.com/defunkt/resque )) fetches price data for each company from Markit On Demand API ( http://dev.markitondemand.com/ ), an external service and updates a price table. A separate process calculates a 20-day moving average for every price record and saves the value in another table.

With all the required data for our app stored, a view for each company is available to the user.

A graph of both the closing price and its 20-day moving average over the last year, using Highcharts ( http://www.highcharts.com/ ). The app also calculates the percentage difference between the most recent closing price and its corresponding 20-day moving average and determines whether this result indicates whether the stock price is currently “bullish” or “bearish”.

The app still has a bit of work to go but has so far been useful in getting to know Rails.